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Earlier this year I was chatting with a colleague about the bids we develop, how they look, and how they might be received by evaluators and clients. She told me about an interesting conversation she had with a client about a bid we had submitted before Christmas. We got good feedback in the bid, but we didn’t score 100%, and part of the reason given was that one of the evaluators was neurodivergent and had found our text-heavy response difficult to visualise. The winning response had started with a clearly visualised delivery plan followed by detailed explanation. It scored 100%, and got us thinking about the considerations we make in our bids (which I will explore in another blog post), and our day-to-day professional lives, to ensure the content we produce is accessible to everyone.
Neurodivergence, colour-blindness, disabilities, can all affect the way people receive and process content, and as professionals we should be considerate of the preferences and needs of others. I would like to stress here that adjusting ways of working to be more accessible need not be a dramatic overhaul of every process and system. It is not weeks or months’ worth of work to change everything you do, but powerful impacts can be made with the most subtle changes.
One thing that I’ve always been acutely aware of is red/green colour-blindness. I remember a friend in primary school who drew a watermelon with green flesh and a red rind, leading to the school’s discovery that he was colourblind. A previous Programme Manager of mine could not read anything we put in red or green text, or against the same backgrounds. The team very easily adjusted our ways of working, and the content we produced, to use a purple, pink or blue instead, and a key was added to make sure other stakeholders were aware of what the colours meant. This is a great example of an adjustment that was made with very little effort, but had a huge impact on my colleague, who no longer had to pause meetings to ask what the content was being presented, which made her feel embarrassed and marginalised.
Following that eye-opening conversation with my colleague, I took the time to research some of the fundamental challenges in the workplace for those with neurodivergence, wanting to understand other people’s experiences outside my own. As someone with neurodivergent individuals in my family, I understand people with the same condition can present in vastly different ways, neurodiversity is a spectrum with no rules. In my research I came across many articles, guides, medical journals and other literature on the subject of Neurodiversity. One snippet of text I loved from the Business Disability Forum was:
“Unlike some other terminology, ‘neurodiversity’ includes strengths as well as some of the challenges and barriers that neurodivergent people may experience. In other words, it looks at the whole person and their environment, not just the perceived negatives.”
This is a really powerful message about how we should be approaching neurodiversity, it is not a negative label, it is understanding how we, and others, process information, what strengths it gives us, as well as the challenges. For example, someone with Autism may be able to retain vast amounts of information, however, may struggle in large social groups. Those with ADHD might have higher levels of creativity and innovation, but they may need to find ways to manage impulsivity or external distractibility. The latter is a challenge I have faced throughout my educational and professional lives, and over the years I found my way to manage it is to have headphones/background noise when I need to focus on a task without being distracted by the environment around me. I’ll note here that these are just two examples pulled at random from personal experience, there are a plethora of people with unique experiences that we need to be cognisant of.
Ultimately, we are all human, with our quirks, challenges, and eccentricities. I hope the takeaway from this blog is that making adjustments to support neurodivergence, disabilities, or anyone in need of assistance is not a barrier or hurdle to overcome. It is giving people the environment, the tools and the support they need to succeed, which in the end helps us all succeed. Adjustments that improve clarity or make things more visual don’t just help those with neurodivergence – they benefit everyone by encouraging new perspectives.
i3Works have recently launched a new ‘Neurodiversity Employee Support Toolkit’, filled with information, support signposting and accessibility tips. We will continue to work to spread awareness of neurodiversity and seek to improve how we can enhance accessibility in all we do – please share your ideas with us!
Thank you for reading, it would be great to hear about the stories you have on the challenges you have faced in the workplace, and whether you have found adjustments that help you succeed.
A few tips to make your content more accessible:
• Be concise, keep it short and simple.
• Break it up, avoid using large blocks of text, use paragraphs, bullet points and headings to make information easier to digest
• Avoid green and red/pink text (colour vision deficiencies)
• Use easy to read fonts
• Consider where diagrams can portray information (particularly important for those with dyslexia)
• This PDF has some fantastic information on how to make your information more accessible to those with neurodivergence: Making information accessible for neurodivergent people
